Author Archives: Greg Spira

When working with companies to improve their demand planning, I regularly get the question: “What is best-in-class forecast accuracy?  What does good look like?” It’s a tricky question to answer.  Many considerations must be taken into account to establish an appropriate definition.  Cumulative lead times and planning time fences guide us to when, and atContinue reading “What is best-in-class forecast accuracy?”

One of the first things that I do when working with a company is carefully listen to the words that they use to describe their planning process, and then understand what their definition of those words is. In many fields there is a common terminology that gives specific meanings to words or expressions. Medical terminology,Continue reading “The Importance of Language in Planning”

Often businesses struggle with a demand planning process anchored in numbers.  If you are spending your time trying to reverse engineer forecasts to understand why one number is different than another, then you are facing the same challenge. As we move to an assumption-driven planning process, one of the best capabilities to develop is toContinue reading “Good Questions drive Good Assumptions”

When someone wants to change a plan number, the questions to ask are: “Why? Which assumption has changed, and is there agreement on the impact of the changed assumption?” Think about the demand planner when someone instructs that a planning number be changed without explanation. (By the way, the same goes for supply planners.) TheContinue reading “Overriding the Demand Plan”

Leaders, like most people, make decisions and operate on that which they trust. If they don’t trust the demand plan, they will most likely adjust, override, or ignore it. How should we measure the trustworthiness of a demand plan? Forecast accuracy is where many would start, but measuring bias is the more fundamental and importantContinue reading “Trust in the Demand Plan”